corporations

Profit over people?

The newsreel is rolling, words are at an all-time cheap. The more they are talking, the less it means to me. — Brand New Kind of Blue – Gold Motel Culture is a plot to hide this fact from you…that there are doorways out of ordinary reality into worlds impossible to describe and too strange […]

What has happened to Britain’s opposition Labour Party under Keir Starmer? The familiar adage “follow the money” helps make sense of the party’s policy shifts ever further rightwards. Labour plumbed new depths earlier this month when it conceded that, in power, it would maintain the government’s cap on child benefit, restricting financial help to the first […]

During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”. Fear of living under Big Brother […]

Though reluctant to admit it publicly, for the sake of morale and status, progressive citizen group leaders taking on the corporate supremacists and their political lackeys are in hard times. With few exceptions, they are neither adjusting with bolder strategies and tactics nor growing fast enough to spin off new divisions and groups. On the […]

Most heads of giant corporations are drunk with their own power. These corporate CEOs push the envelope in ways that harm defenseless people. They believe they can get away with anything, and they do, with few exceptions. The few corporate crime prosecutions keep declining from Obama to Trump to Biden, due to a settlement-obsessed Department […]

Since 1997, the U.S. is one of only two countries (the other being New Zealand) that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising for health products like medications and procedures. Such DTC advertising in the U.S. increased from $2.1 billion in 1997 to $9.6 billion in 2016 — and continues to rise. And you wonder why two-thirds of […]

Today, in the mainstream narrative, there is much talk of a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much- promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘sustainable’ production.   These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and […]

Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s […]

It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous message: “Your Voice/Your Vote/Be Heard. Every […]